The St. Louis ministers weren’t prepared to debate polygamy.

Darren Young and Thurman Williams, who work in urban ministry in St. Louis, say they joined an accountability group with fellow local pastor and Fuller Theological Seminary professor Vince Bantu for moral support and mutual discipleship.

They felt honored to be in the group with him. Bantu is a rising star in American evangelicalism—an energetic Black scholar doing important research on the origins of Christianity and making it relevant to the church today.

His work has been praised as “nothing short of paradigm shifting,” and he has been called “a legit legend and “a force of nature” who “drops all kinds of fire.” His book A Multitude of All Peoples won a CT award of merit in 2021.

Bantu is in great demand on the evangelical lecture circuit. Just this year he has spoken at Calvin University, Dallas Theological Seminary, the Jude 3 Project’s annual gathering in Washington, DC, several smaller Christian colleges, and some large evangelical churches. Not to mention podcasts, webinars, and the history and theology classes he teaches at Fuller, both online and at the seminary’s Houston campus.

But for the past five years, when Bantu was home in St. Louis, he would meet with his accountability group. The three Black men would talk about life and ministry and sin. They would try to set up guardrails to help each other avoid temptation.

Until Bantu started to argue that one way for him to avoid sexual temptation was to marry multiple women, the accountability partners told Christianity Today.

They were sitting in the Drip Community Coffee House in south St. Louis in December 2023, both men recalled in separate interviews, when Bantu announced that he thought polygamy was biblical and he was talking to his wife about marrying more women. According to the ministers, he told them he had two in mind.

“I was just dumbfounded,” said Williams, who pastors a Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) congregation and directs the homiletics program at Covenant Theological Seminary.

The three men met again in January at Ari’s Ice Cream Parlor and Cafe on the north side of the city. Text messages shared with CT show Bantu sent the two men an article defending polygamy as a Christian sexual ethic and arguing that Western culture condemns marrying multiple women—but the Bible doesn’t.

“I should have just said, ‘Man this is crazy,’” Williams said. “But I tried to argue with him about it.”

As they started to talk over breakfast at Ari’s, the two men recall, Bantu announced that he already had a second wife. He said he was secretly practicing polygamy with a woman who attended his church and was also one of his students.

“I never saw it coming,” said Young, a Young Life area director. “I just never would have thought that. He said he married himself and her ‘unto the Lord.’ That was the phrase he used, ‘unto the Lord.’”

Bantu denies this. He sent CT a statement saying the men in his accountability group are lying.

“My brothers in Christ have fallen into the snare of jealousy and have made false allegations about me,” Bantu wrote. “I cannot fully comprehend the motivation for these accusations.”

According to Bantu, it is true the practice of marrying multiple women “came up in conversation,” but he wasn’t advocating polygamy. He told CT in an email, “I believe biblical marriage is marital union between one man and one woman who enter into a marriage covenant with Christ.”

The woman that Bantu purportedly married “unto the Lord” also denies it.

“I would never do something like that,” she said in an email to CT. “I am friends with the Bantus.”

But a bishop responsible for oversight of Bantu’s nondenominational Beloved Community Church said the allegations are “consistent and credible.”

The bishop, Paulea Mooney-McCoy, a Black woman based in Boston, questioned Bantu about the allegations in April, according to an email she wrote to Williams and Young. But she could not get clear or complete answers from him.

“His response fails to make logical sense to me,” she told the accountability group.

Mooney-McCoy was not convinced she was getting the truth. She subsequently resigned her oversight position earlier this year.

The two accountability partners enlisted another local Black pastor, Michael Byrd, to act as a witness in their dispute with Bantu, in accordance with the men’s reading of Matthew 18:16.

Together, the three ministers told Bantu he needed to confess his polygamy to his church, his ministry partners, and the institutions where he teaches. He rebuffed them, the men said.

“He just said, ‘We’re not talking about this,’” Byrd, who is Southern Baptist, told CT. “And ‘If you tell anybody my business, I’m suing y’all for defamation.’”

When the three ministers became convinced that Bantu would not repent, they wrote to the leadership of Fuller Seminary, where Bantu holds a position in the school of missions and theology. Fuller faculty are required to uphold the seminary’s community standards, which includes a commitment to the belief that marriage is a “covenant union between one man and one woman.”

The school is currently looking into the allegations.

“Fuller Seminary is committed to thoroughly investigating any allegations of inappropriate conduct,” general counsel Lance Griffin said in a statement. “We are aware of these allegations and can confirm an internal investigation is underway.”

Fuller has also hired Public Interest Investigations, a California firm with 11 investigators, to conduct an inquiry. When it is finished, the firm will report its findings to the administration.

The three ministers sent another letter with their concerns about Bantu to the board of Meachum School of Haymanot, a seminary that aims to bring graduate-level theological education to Black communities. Bantu founded the school and is listed on the website as “Ohene,” a Ghanian word meaning chief or king.

The student that Bantu reportedly said he married is enrolled at Meachum. She posted on social media that she would “highly highly highly” recommend a class with Bantu.

The chair of Meachum’s board responded to the letter from the accountability group with a threat of legal action.

“I wish to advise you that if necessary we will seek legal recourse and damages from each of you to the fullest extent of the law,” C. Jeffrey Wright, who is also CEO of Urban Ministries, wrote in an email that was shared with CT. “Defamation is a serious matter.”

Wright noted in the email that he is also on the board at Fuller but indicated he was writing in his capacity at Meachum and Urban Ministries. He declined CT’s request for an interview.

The accountability group has now decided to go public. The three ministers believe it is their responsibility, as accountability partners for a Christian brother they believe is unrepentant, to “tell it to the church” (Matt. 18:17).

They said they are concerned the evangelical institutions will not take sufficient action—or will handle the matter but keep it private, as a personnel issue. They told CT that even if Fuller or Meachum do a full investigation and decide the accusations are true, they believe Bantu will likely be able to move on and find other teaching and speaking opportunities.

He was forced to resign from one church and one seminary in 2018 for an inappropriate relationship with a student. The student came forward, prompting a Title IX investigation, and Bantu confessed and stepped down. Yet there is no gap in his resume. The following year, according to his curriculum vitae, Bantu taught seminary courses at Western, Eden, NAIITS, and Fuller, where he was later made an assistant professor.

He joined the leadership council of the And Campaign. In 2019 and 2020, he accepted invitations to speak at Biola University, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and three Christian conferences, his curriculum vitae shows.

The evangelical speaking circuit and his teaching positions have allowed Bantu to connect with multiple women, convincing some of them to have sex with him, according to the men in his accountability group.

The pastor of his previous congregation, Outpour Evangelical Covenant Church in St. Louis, said there is now a clear pattern: Bantu gets in trouble, the issues are dealt with privately, and he gets to move on without any change to his behavior.

Bum Kim, a Korean American pastor in the Evangelical Covenant denomination, brought Bantu on as his co-pastor at Outpour in 2016. They shared a single salary in an effort to grow a diverse, multiethnic church with a strong commitment to evangelism and social justice.

Kim told CT he knew Bantu through his teaching, speaking, and writing, and had seen him around St. Louis, which is Bantu’s hometown. Kim met with him, discussed the vision of the church, and was impressed by Bantu’s passion for racial reconciliation, social justice, and community development.

That was the extent of the vetting.

“We didn’t reach out to the last place that Vince served, and no one has reached out to us since he left,” Kim said. “Who is going to be next? There’s always going to be a next place.”

Bantu, who is biracial, was born Vince Campbell and changed his name in graduate school while exploring the history of Christianity in Africa. The word Bantu is the name for a family of African languages, including Swahili, Zulu, and Kongo, and the people who speak them.

Bantu studied Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and wrote a dissertation on Egyptian Christians’ ethnic identity in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. He earned his doctorate in 2015 and started speaking widely in evangelical circles on “the ancient future of globalizing Christianity,” arguing that “Christianity is not a white man’s religion.”

That same year, he took a visiting position at Covenant Theological Seminary, the PCA school in Missouri, as a professor of missiology. He taught God’s World Mission, a class which seminarians typically took in their first semester.

Some of his students also attended Jubilee Community Church, where Bantu was an assistant pastor until he suddenly left without much explanation, according to a student who later made allegations of an inappropriate relationship. She went to Jubilee with him and then accepted an invitation to attend Bible studies at his house.

The woman spoke to CT on the condition she not be named in this story. CT allows victims of harassment and abuse to remain anonymous. Her identity and many of the details of her story were confirmed by multiple sources.

“It was easy to gravitate to him and connect to him, especially if you cared about multicultural stuff, poverty issues, and all of that,” the seminary student said. “I started spending time at the Bantus’ house, just hanging out on the regular.”

The seminary student followed Bantu to Outpour Community Church, where he became a co-pastor with Kim. In 2018, she said, Bantu approached her and told her he wanted to be her friend—not just professor-student, but “friend friend.” She happily agreed. But a day or so later, she recalled, Bantu pushed for more commitment.

“For him, friendship is this huge deal. It’s really fraught. He mentioned betrayal explicitly,” she said.

Soon after, according to the woman, she and Bantu started texting constantly and spending lots of time together. One Saturday evening he took her to the St. Louis Steak ’n Shake where he hung out as a kid, and then drove around all night on a tour of his childhood, talking until it was time to go to church. Bantu preached that Sunday morning.

The relationship grew more intense, with escalating demands of intimacy and commitment, the seminarian told CT. Bantu said his “love language” was words of affirmation and urged the young woman to affirm him, she recalled. He would ask her, “What do you love about our relationship?” If she went five hours without texting, he would get offended.

The seminarian was 28 years old at the time. Bantu was 36.

The woman recalled he also started to push her to be more physically affectionate, which he said was normal and healthy for friends. They would hold hands, she told CT, and hug for a long time, and he would kiss her on both cheeks.

“To me, it was platonic but weird,” the woman said. “I know people could look at me and say, ‘How could you not read that as romantic?’ I’m sorry. I didn’t. He was my pastor and professor, and I trusted him.”

The student was surprised, she said, when Bantu professed his love for her.

“He told me he believes you can have romantic relationships outside of marriage, and it’s biblical to be romantic outside the confines of marriage,” she said. “He would never commit adultery, but he was really hoping I would agree to be in an extramarital romantic relationship with him.”

The woman said she told Bantu she didn’t think that sounded biblical. It didn’t seem right to her. She also said she didn’t have feelings for Bantu but saw him more as a mentor, someone she could learn from. She promised not to cut off the relationship, though.

“He was the center of my entire community,” the woman told CT. “And I didn’t want to be the person who abandoned him.”

Around that time, the seminarian found a book at the library called Anatomy of an Affair. She read it and realized, she said, that her relationship with Bantu fit the definition of an “emotional affair.”

When she told that to Bantu, he admitted he had previously committed adultery and had been thinking about having sex with her, the woman said. He confessed to a “love addiction” and asked for the seminarian’s help navigating his emotional issues. She recalled talking with him in his parked car until 4 a.m. that night.

A week later, at the encouragement of a friend, the woman called the assistant dean of students at Covenant and said, “I want to report an inappropriate relationship between me and Dr. Bantu.”

The school investigated, and Bantu agreed to step down in 2018.

“He was a visiting professor, and his employment with the school ended through resignation,” Covenant president Thomas C. Gibbs told CT. “It was, at the time, believed Dr. Bantu was demonstrating full repentance and had given a full confession.”

The seminary also informed Outpour Community Church of its investigation and Bantu’s confession to an inappropriate relationship with a student.

Bantu repeated the confession to his co-pastor, Kim, and gave church elders typed-out transcripts of text messages between him and the seminary student as evidence of what he called an “emotional affair.”

Bantu wrote a letter to the church announcing that he was going to step down. Kim sent it out to the congregation on November 26, a few days after Thanksgiving.

“I initiated and participated in an emotional affair with a sister in Christ,” said the letter, which was given to CT. “I used the absence of sexual behavior in the relationship as justification to engage in intimate conversation which led to the development and communication on my part of romantic feelings.”

Bantu privately expressed his expectation he could return to ministry in six months or a year, according to Kim, who said that he told him, “That will never happen.”

The pastors argued about qualifications for ministry and standards of accountability.

“He wouldn’t accept any authority. He wouldn’t give me authority, and he didn’t want to be under the authority of any denomination that was white,” Kim said. “But Vince wouldn’t join one of the Black denominations and sit under a Black pastor either. He was obviously gifted and charismatic, but he needed to be discipled by an aged, experienced Black pastor.”

The two men parted ways. Bantu was fairly open about what happened, according to people who talked to him at the time. He said he’d messed up and had an emotional affair. But he also blamed Kim and said there were racial dynamics to their conflict.

Bantu set up his own restoration process with a group of local ministers who were his peers. It is not clear what that process involved, but Bantu was restored to ministry by the ad hoc group after about a year. He started his own congregation called Beloved Community Church in late 2019 or early 2020.

Beloved is a small multiethnic and multilingual church, with regular attendance of about 12 people. The congregation rents space to meet and also spends a lot of time socializing, including regular retreats, vision trips, and “kick-its.” Bantu is the main preacher and focuses the bulk of his 45-minute sermons on themes of justice.

Even for a nondenominational church of that size, the authority structure that Bantu set up at Beloved was unusual. There was the bishop in Boston—though it is unclear how she got that title or how she provided oversight. Paulea Mooney-McCoy declined to speak to CT.

Bantu’s church also has two elders. In his statement to CT, Bantu said he is “grateful for the continued support and guidance of the elders” at Beloved Community. One of them, until recently, was Bantu’s mother, who is also taking classes at the seminary he founded.

The accountability group started around the same time as Beloved. Young told CT that in the planning stages and in the early accountability meetings, they talked about the need for intense commitment to the group—almost a covenant. Bantu wanted that, and Young did too.

There were four or five others, but they eventually dropped off, and the group settled in as just the three ministers working in similar urban contexts: Young, Bantu, and Williams.

Williams was a preaching professor at Covenant and had 25 years’ experience as a pastor. He had also just planted his own church in St. Louis’s West End neighborhood and was eager for the kind of relationships with other ministers that could sustain a pastor through difficult days.

“I knew I needed that, both the friendship with people outside my own church and a place to talk about real things with people,” Williams said. “That’s what I was looking for.”

Young respected Bantu as a minister and scholar who had a national profile but also cared deeply about their city. He was impressed with the man’s authenticity, vulnerability, and openness.

He was even more impressed when Bantu confessed a past affair, telling the group, as Young and Williams both recalled, that he had had sex with one of his wife’s close friends. The adultery had ended seven or eight years before, and the various relationships had all been restored.

But in 2021, the men said, Bantu admitted the same woman was living with his family and serving at his church, and said the two of them were starting to cross emotional and physical lines.

“I remember thinking, We’re doing it. We’re living out true community and accountability,” Young told CT. “And also, Brother, you need to get her out of your house! What are you doing?”

Bantu denies this happened. He said the woman currently lives with him and his family, but there was no affair. The woman also told CT that she has lived with the Bantus for about 10 years and while she and Bantu are close friends, “there isn’t anything inappropriate about our relationship.”

In a text sent to the accountability partners and shared with CT, however, Bantu said that living situation was “dangerous” because of past mistakes, but assured the men that at the moment, “nothing is happening with her.”

The three men kept talking in 2021. They kept trying to hold each other accountable, trying to help each other make good decisions and avoid moral failures. Young and Williams told CT that in 2022, though, Bantu confessed to multiple recent incidents of adultery with women he met while traveling.

He texted Young after one of them: “Just screwed up big time brother.”

Young replied, “Uh oh,” in the text exchange, which he shared with CT.

At a late-night meeting at a Buffalo Wild Wings, the two men recall, Bantu confessed he had met one woman in a hotel and had sex with another multiple times in a car at the St. Louis airport.

“It was probably 10 or 11 at night,” Young said, “and I am yelling at Vince in the Buffalo Wild Wings: ‘You can’t be a pastor and sleep around with women! You have to pick one! You can’t do both! You have to pick.’”

In another text from 2022, Bantu said he had repeatedly broken his marriage vows “in terms of faithfulness.” He wanted to save his marriage. He said he had ended one ongoing affair, although he was still “open to talking to her for feeling pursued by her which I don’t think is overtly sinful.” In the text he admitted this was “dangerous.”

Bantu told CT that while he did tell the men in his accountability group about “sinful actions” in the past, none of them occurred after 2019.

“I deny all of the allegations that allegedly took place during my time at Fuller,” he wrote in an email. “During my time at Fuller I have been in compliance with our Statement of Faith and Community Standards.”

Williams and Young say this is not true. They say their group was not talking about past sins but ongoing moral struggles and the crises brought on by temptation.

“Still talking with the woman but haven’t slipped up again,” Bantu wrote in one text in 2022. And then a few days later he added, “I’m tripping for real,” saying he and the woman “talk and text all day everyday,” and “I feel bad like I probably shouldn’t.”

In 2023, the two men told CT, Bantu confessed to another affair with a woman he had met on social media. She had sent him a direct message because she appreciated his scholarship, and Bantu encouraged her to move to St. Louis to study at Meachum.

The woman did move, enrolling at the school and attending his church, the two men said.

Bantu confessed that he and the Meachum student then started to have sex, according to Williams and Young.

“I lost it,” Young said. “I started yelling, ‘How foolish can you be! Vince, we need you. You cannot be another fallen pastor. You can’t.’”

Bantu denies having an inappropriate relationship with this student. He described the woman twice in his email as “a family friend.”

The woman told CT the same thing in an email.

“I am disgusted,” she said. “When I heard that these men were accusing me of participating in polygamy I was irate because that is a lie and I would never do something like that.”

The woman said she does not live with the Bantus and never has.

Bantu is currently building a new home in St. Louis’s West End neighborhood. It is round, designed to look like an African hut, and will be decorated with African symbols. The building is two stories and will have three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a small movie theater.

“It’s the only round house in the neighborhood,” said Andrew Medlen, a minister who lives across the alley from the construction. “It’s one of those houses—people drive by, they slow down to look at it. People in the neighborhood talk about it. And that’s Vince. He loves that.”

Medlen and his family briefly attended Bantu’s church before deciding they weren’t comfortable there. He knows the men in the accountability group and is convinced they are telling the truth about Bantu.

“I didn’t see it,” he told CT, “but there were some weird things that make sense now.”

The accountability group said that at a follow-up meeting in December 2023, Bantu told them he was considering polygamy. He told them it was biblical and they just needed to “to study the Scriptures from a non-Westernized position,” they said.

He followed up that night, sharing an article that he said looked at the different views among Christians in Africa but made the case for “the validity of polygamy.”

In January 2024, the men met to argue about it, and they say Bantu told them at that meeting he was actually already practicing polygamy and had married the Meachum student “unto the Lord.”

Bantu said his wife and her friend had accepted his arguments for polygamy, the two men recall, though Bantu’s two children were struggling with the idea of having multiple moms. The ministers said they tried to argue with him but didn’t have any success.

“He’s really good at arguing,” Williams said. “I feel like I failed him. Like I let him get comfortable in that hot water, and before he knew it, the water was boiling. And even more, I feel like I failed all the people that his behavior impacts.”

According to Williams and Young, Bantu claimed monogamy is a Western cultural practice, not a biblical one. He said polygamy has long been acceptable in African Christianity.

Multiple African Christian scholars told CT this is not true.

“It is not characteristic of African Christianity,” said Nimi Wariboko, a Nigerian professor who teaches theology at Boston University. “It is part of the rhetoric against Indigenous churches. When Indigenous Christians felt white missionaries weren’t treating them fairly and they wanted to assert their human dignity, they broke away, and the missionary churches said they were doing it because they wanted to practice polygamy.”

There is a debate, according to Wariboko, about whether polygamous converts to Christian faith should be required to divorce their additional wives. But there has never been general acceptance of polygamy in African-led churches.

And even among non-Christian polygamists, Wariboko said, there is no such thing in Africa as a secret second marriage. Marriages are public; affairs are secret.

Ebenezer Blasu, a theology professor at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture in Ghana, added that Christians should look to the Bible, not to Africa, to learn what is biblical.

“Africa does not determine biblical value and moral systems,” he told CT. “A close look [at the New Testament] suggests Jesus endorses monogamy as the original establishment of God.”

Bantu has not spoken publicly on polygamy, nor has he spoken or written about Christian sexual ethics and the biblical view of marriage. He told CT he affirms Fuller’s statement on the issue, though.

In spring 2024, the accountability group decided not to debate polygamy with Bantu. Williams and Young said they didn’t really think their differences with Bantu were theological. Bantu, they said, wasn’t persuaded to embrace polygamy by his academic study and Bible reading. He was coming up with a theological justification for his moral failings.

Michael Byrd, the pastor who joined the accountability group as a Matthew 18 witness, told CT he has spent 20 years in ministry and known many Black and white ministers in St. Louis. He’s never heard anyone argue for polygamy.

“I mean, come on,” Byrd said. “It’s sexual sin. It’s sexual sin. It’s just a different name for it.”

The accountability group met for the last time in April 2024. Young, Williams, and Byrd told Bantu that he needed to confess, repent, and resign from ministry, and end his secret marriage to a seminary student.

Bantu walked out, they said.

For the three St. Louis ministers, that doesn’t end their responsibility. They believe they are still morally bound to call Bantu to repentance, however public that has to be.

“He’s trying to avoid accountability, and he’s using his position and his fame,” Young told CT. “I committed to him that I would hold him accountable … but I never thought I’d be here with my friend Vince.”

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